29
Wing Selection felt like a twisted cross between a holiday ball and an execution. Most of the older Kettral certainly treated it like a holiday. Someone had rolled a couple of casks of ale into the main training arena—the Eyrie loosened the strict prohibition against alcohol on Qarsh for the event—and the grizzled veterans brought their own tankards. Most of them had been going at the liquor with a will since midmorning, staking out seats on the stone walls ringing the space, tossing back and forth taunts and insults with the careless cheer of men and women who narrowly avoided death day in and day out, but who, for the space of a few hours, could afford to let down their guard and enjoy the discomfort of others.
“Hey, Sharpe,” one of the men bellowed down at Gwenna. It was Plenchen Zee—thick as a barrel but damned near impossible to kill, if the stories were true. Someone had sliced out one of his eyes, and he’d taken to filling the cavity with all sorts of unsettling things: stones, radishes, eggs. Today a ruby bulged jauntily from the socket. “I’ve got a spot on my Wing for a lady like you.” He waggled his tongue while raising his eyebrows.
Gwenna turned on her bench to fix him with a glare. “If you’re looking for a whore, I’d recommend Sami Yurl. I’m in demolitions.”
“You might want to watch your tongue,” Yurl snapped from a few rows away. He had no visible scars from the Trial, his blond hair was as carefully coiffed as ever, but his eyes were angry, sullen at the unexpected slight. “If you’re assigned to my Wing, I just might have to cut it out.”
Zee roared with laughter at the exchange, oblivious of or indifferent to the undercurrent of real hatred running beneath the words. This was the part of Wing Selection that felt like an execution. Sometime between the emergence of the cadets from Hull’s Hole and now, two days later, a cabal of commanders and trainers had put their heads together to decide which cadets would go where. Their decisions were final and not open to appeal. Some of the newly minted Kettral would be assigned to veteran Wings, filling gaps left by those who had been killed flying missions; others would comprise original Wings of their own. Despite the barrels brimming with ale, the Annurian banners flapping against the sky, the tables around the edge of the arena piled with shanks of lamb, braised haddock, and a dozen kinds of fruit, some assignments today would turn out to be death sentences.
“’Shael on a stick,” Gent muttered, glancing over his shoulder, “I hope I don’t get stuck with Zee.”
“I think he’s got eyes only for Gwenna,” Laith replied with a shrug.
“Good. The soldiers on his Wing don’t live that long.”
“Could be worse,” Laith said. “At least Zee’s a vet. He’s been out there. He’s been tested. Valyn here’s going to get four cadets, and he’s green as the summer grass. You want to talk about a shitty draw—”
“I’m sitting right here, asshole,” Valyn snapped. He felt both the excitement and the anxiety of his friends, but both were tempered by the angry ache lodged inside his chest. Lin should have been with them, swapping jests and gibes, her dark eyes bright as she waited for her assignment. Not long ago, he’d thought the chances were good that she might even end up on his Wing. It would be logical—
He cut the thought short. She was gone. Someone sitting in the arena had killed her, someone who had just been raised to the rank of full Kettral, someone who might end up assigned to his own Wing.
Laith, sensing the shift in mood, put a hand on Valyn’s shoulder. “You can’t have her back, Val,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically sober. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t go on. We’re all going to die at some point—at least she went quickly, still young and strong.”
Valyn shook his head. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t alone in his sorrow. Laith and Gent, half the ’Kent-kissing class, had liked and admired Lin. He didn’t have a monopoly on his mourning. On the other hand, half the class hadn’t kissed her just before the Trial. Half the class hadn’t let her be beaten blue and bloody on the West Bluffs. Half the class didn’t know that she’d been murdered down in the Hole. He carried that knowledge alone. He wasn’t sure he would have felt any better if she had died honestly in the normal rigors of the test, but at least he wouldn’t be nagged by guilt, by the crushing burden of knowledge. Laith and Gent had said their good-byes, shed their tears, and let Lin go. Valyn couldn’t stop hashing and rehashing events, eyeing with suspicion everyone who crossed his path, plotting an inchoate revenge.
He scanned the faces. Yurl and Balendin were there, a dozen paces away, the leach’s wolfhounds slavering in the morning heat. At some point, this week or this year, Valyn planned to hurt them, hurt them badly, for what they had done to Ha Lin up on the West Bluffs, regardless of whether they were involved in her death down in the Hole. It was the others he needed to worry about now, the ones he hadn’t figured out. He shifted his gaze to Annick.
She sat on the far end of the benches, her bow across her slender knees. At this distance, without being able to see her eyes, he thought she looked almost like a child, lost and alone. Where most of the cadets had gathered in small knots, Annick held herself apart—no one had come within a few paces of her, although some of the veterans seemed to be considering the sniper from beneath hooded eyes. She was a good prospect to step up to one of the established Wings—she was as deadly as any soldier twice her age with that bow, and she certainly had no connections among her peers.
In retrospect, the fact that Annick had come out of the Hole alive was something of a mystery. Underground, in the dark, that bow of hers didn’t count for much. Given the winding of the tunnels, it would take a miracle to even draw the thing before the slarn could attack. This would have been a problem for all the snipers, but most were more proficient with their blades. Valyn narrowed his eyes, but there was nothing to see—just a girl, her hair cut short, eyes fixed on the weapon in her hands.
He turned to look at Talal. The leach, too, sat a little apart, although he looked comfortable with his isolation. A slarn had raked its claws across his face, and while the wounds weren’t immediately obvious on his dark skin, one of those claws had missed his eye by the barest whisker. Valyn eyed the bracelets racked on his wrists—bronze, steel, iron, jade—the hoops and stones, precious and ordinary, sunk in his ears. A leach could draw his power from any of those things, or none.
“I wonder what his well is,” Valyn said, half to himself.
Laith raised an eyebrow. “You want to play that guessing game? Have fun. I’m sure the last eight years have narrowed it down to about a thousand possibilities … provided you were paying attention and taking notes.”
“Doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Gent chimed in.
“What?” Laith responded, grinning. “The fact that we got two blades and a torch when we went down in the Hole while Talal brought the ability to bend nature to his will?”
Valyn considered his next question carefully. He trusted Laith and Gent as much as anyone else on the Islands, but he wasn’t ready to tip his hand, not yet.
“What did people bring with them?” he asked. “I was so wiped from the first week that I wandered in with just my blacks and the blades on my back.”
Laith shrugged. “Most of the snipers had their bows. I think Gwenna carted along some demo—I could have sworn I heard an explosion down there. On the other hand, that might have been the poison pounding in my ears as my sanity slowly slipped away.”
“Grub,” Gent replied. “I stuffed my pockets before leaving the ship. Had enough of raw fucking rat.” Of course. Even now, he held a massive turkey wing in his equally massive hand, waving it around the way a field marshal might gesture with his baton. Gent’s favorite chapter of the Tactics was the eighth, the one that began, On an extended mission, food is as important as fighting.…
“Anything else?” Valyn pressed. “Did anyone bring … I don’t know, packs or cord or anything like that?”
“What were you going to pack?” Laith asked skeptically. “A bottle of Raaltan red and an embroidered tunic for the ball?”
Valyn spread his hands in defeat. If his friends were anything like him, they’d been paying more attention to the slarn and the gaping hole in the rock than they had to the gear carried by those surrounding them. Anyone could have brought the Liran cord that had bound Lin’s wrists. It was light and supple enough to pocket, cram in a small pack, or even thread through the belt loops that held up a cadet’s pants.
The hooting and heckling from the soldiers crested for a moment, and Valyn looked over to see Jakob Rallen walking into the arena, leaning heavily on his cane to support his bulk. Although the Kettral were the only military branch to eschew formal uniforms, Rallen was dressed for the occasion in crisp blacks, his hair carefully combed across his sweating pate. As Master of Cadets, he would preside over the ceremony—Valyn remembered as much from past years—and he did all he could to invest the role with more pomp and grandeur than it deserved. A low table and a high-backed chair sat at the center of the arena, the focus of the assembled benches, and Rallen took his seat with obvious pleasure in front of a dangling Annurian flag, the sunburst bright against the white cloth.
“Flag,” Gent grunted around a mouthful of meat. “First time I’ve seen one of those on the Islands.”